Closing#2: Bangkok: Now we are here  in the year twenty-three, I thought it worthwhile to offer a few thoughts about the number 23. What I mean is the belief that the number 23 has some sort of magical or mystical significance, because of all the instances in which it occurs. A quick dive into internet and the many web pages exploring the “enigma of 23” tells me: All of us humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in our genetic makeup.The Earth is inclined on its orbital plane by 23.5 degrees. The “point-five” can be represented as 5 = 2 + 3. The September 11 attacks occurred on 9/11/2001, 9 + 11 + 2 + 1 = 23. Psalm 23 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. The letter W has 2 points down and 3 up = 23. It is also the 23rd letter of the alphabet. Harpo Marx’s birthday was Nov. 23, 1888, and Bonnie and Clyde’s death on May 23, 1934. There are more. Twenty-three seems to pop up when you least expect it… That’s how it was for me, many years ago, a friend told me that he had learned about the mystery of 23 on his 23rd birthday by somebody else who said, once you start to think about it, the number twenty-three seems to arrive in your awareness in all kinds of ways: a bookmarked page number, parts of car numbers, parts of phone numbers, house numbers… and if you have the ability to perceive “truth” in nearly anything, you can associate 23 with; all sorts of extraordinary things. But you don’t have to do that, he said; just note the incidental nature of it appearing in ordinary consciousness. So that’s what my friend did and after a while it just started to appear in daily life. When we were driving around town, he’d point out 23 here and there, so I decide to start doing that too and sure enough, it begins to get my attention every now and then… or maybe it doesn’t for quite a long time, then suddenly it’s the 23rd of the month, or a utilities bill arrives and the first two digits of the reference number are 23 – it is significant if only because it appears in so many forms. And so, it seemed to follow along with me for many years. Then I came to live in Thailand and it disappeared, maybe because there isn’t so much communicative imagery out there, trying to get my attention, or if there is, I don’t pay attention to it because it’s all in Thai.The prevalence of 23 can be explained as an example of ‘apophenia,’ the tendency to see connections or meaningful patterns between unrelated or random things. Or ‘selection bias,’ which refers to the falsification of a statistical analysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples. Also ‘confirmation bias,’ the tendency to search for, or interpret information in a way that confirms or supports prior beliefs or values.Whatever, what I’m saying is; if after reading this, you find the number 23 appearing in ordinary incidental awareness from time to time, check back here and see if anybody else has noticed it. That’s all, and have a good day.

Closing#1: Bangkok: Hi everybody, I thought I’d introduce two members of the household. The grey and white has a French name, he is Benoit [ben-wa]. The ginger one is Croissant [kwa-son] … when she curls up to sleep, she looks like a croissant. Their owner is M our niece who lives with us. She came down from Chiang Mai with the cattos (note; they are not cats, they are cattos; it’s a special species) … so the cattos came in a friend’s car, a seven-hour journey. A long time, but Benoit and Croissant were free to explore the whole of the interior of the car – look out the windows, ‘where are we now?’ Food and water and toilet box behind the back seats… then sleep together somewhere among the blankets.

Now they are here, and it’s been nearly a year. They integrate with nearly every aspect of our lives; this is their residence; this is their world. They can’t go out to the garden beyond the screen doors. Everything they need is in here, a staircase they can run up and down on, get exercise, fall asleep together somewhere upstairs or downstairs – get lost in sleep… [more later]

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Bangkok: In Buddhism there is no continuing, personal Self, only a temporary, constantly changing, aggregation of mental and physical elements. For all intents and purposes there is no self. There is no God, no divine being in human form. There is, however, an understanding of the Divine Spark’ of the Gnostics; the spark of knowing: gnosis, consciousness. Christian Gnostic groups in the first century AD, emphasized personal spiritual knowledge above the orthodox teachings, and traditions. The quiet struggle against the authority of religious institutions continues up to the present day. Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr says people are disillusioned with conservative churches that teach that nonbelievers go to Hell.

So, what happened to the Gnostic writings which flourished among Christian groups in the Mediterranean world? Fathers of the early Church in the second century, denounced them as heresy. Efforts to destroy these texts proved largely successful, resulting in the survival of very little writing by Gnostic theologians. What were these early Gnostics mainly concerned about? According to the Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Christian Bible), God plants the two trees of knowledge and immortality in the Garden of Eden, yet forbids Adam and Eve to eat from them. He warns the other gods, the Elohim, that if humans should taste omniscience and everlasting life, they will become divine like God himself, and this must be prevented at all costs.

The Gnostics felt that if God was truly good, he wouldn’t want to keep these divine gifts from humankind, and therefore concluded that the God of the Old Testament is evil, a malignant being who traps human souls in the world of matter he created. In order to keep them subject to his power, they believed, he must prevent them from realizing their true nature—that they are divine beings from a kingdom of light which transcends the world of suffering in which he keeps them enslaved.

This alternative reading of the book of Genesis can be found in the Nag Hammadi texts ‘On the Origin of the World and The Hypostasis of the Archons.’ The Nag Hammadi texts were discovered in Egypt in 1945. There is so much to find in these texts, including the dialogue between Jesus and his brother James. Jesus explicitly tells James, “Free yourself from this blind idea, that you are merely the case of flesh which encircles you. Then you will reach Him Who is. Then you will no longer be James; rather you are the One Who is.” It’s amazing to find this Vedantic teaching, from India, claiming that the individual soul (Atman) is identical with God himself (Brahman), spelled out so clearly in an early Christian text. Today Christians believe that only Christ was “one” with God, but Jesus seems to be saying that the rest of us are too.

“We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s missing is awareness.” [Richard Rohr] According to Rohr’s teachings, a person does not have to follow Jesus or practice any formal religion to come by salvation, but rather “fall in love with the divine presence, under whatever name.” The Perennial Tradition, or Perennial Philosophy, forms the basis of much of his teaching. “God’s love for the world has existed since the beginning of time, suffuses everything in creation, and has been present in all cultures and civilizations. Jesus is an incarnation of that spirit. But this spirit can also be found through Buddhist meditation, or through communing with nature. This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed.”

In an early Latin work Eckhart asserts, ‘God is existence’ (Deus est esse), that ‘existence is God’(esse est deus). The ‘isness’ of all that exists is God. This is the ‘birth of the Son of God in the soul.’ In Eckhart’s Christology the reason for the Incarnation (indeed, for the Creation) is that human beings might come to a realization or conscious awareness of themselves as the ‘image and likeness of God’, bringing forth or ‘giving birth’ to the Son of God within their innermost soul. Christ is understood not as Redeemer but as Reminder: ‘Christ came to remind us of our blessed and divine origins as images and likenesses of God in a grace-filled universe. The purpose of his coming is more our divinization than our redemption from sin and guilt.’

“The ineffable reality of God lies beyond our ordinary comprehension.” I have only just started finding out about this special kind of Christian contemplation (apophaticism) that rejects all the attributes and ideas about God we’ve known since we were children, and staying in the ‘darkness’ of a state of “unknowing.” Thus, arriving at this experiential union with the divine.

There are many things about this kind of Christian contemplation that seem very ‘Buddhist’ to me, I recognise the state of unknowing as being that which is outside human experience. Not impossible that the Buddha’s Dhamma had an influence on the Jesus Teachings. Maybe that’s why I had this strange recognition of it, déjà vu, when I first went to Wat Pah Nanachat in 1984. Studying Buddhism revealed fragments of an innate knowledge.

Instead of being deluded by the conditioned realm, I observe it. There is the state of knowing, of being aware of the changingness of conditioned phenomena – behind which there is the Unconditioned. With intuitive awareness – we find that silence, the unconditioned, as an embracing background, within which the conditions are in perspective. They are the way they are, they’re like this: but then they end, they cease. [Ajahn Sumedho. Escape. Forest Sangha Newsletter: October 2000]

Excerpts from the following:

Richard Rohr: “Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe,” The New Yorker, February2, 2020

Christopher Malcolm Knauf: Meister Eckhart and the ‘Wayless Way’.

Lynda Johnsen: Gnostic Texts Reveal Jesus in a New Light

Photo: Sunset on Phuket Island, by M.

POSTCARD#500: Bangkok: Three years have passed since we were last on this Bangkok-Chiang Mai flight, the marker in time is COVID-19. Hard to believe it’s been three years. These days, the passing of time is all of a oneness… I’m ‘flying away’ in a manner of speaking, as the mind wanders where it will. Grateful for the mindful collectedness to ‘know’ the mind has gone adrift and bring it back to where it’s at. We landed in Chiang Mai and made our way to the apartment, stepping back into the quietude of mountains and trees all around.

An easefulness, this is how it was on the flight today, maybe it was that airborne feeling, but as soon as I close my eyes, I stop thinking, and there’s just nothing there. Awareness of the cold air on my head coming from the air vent above – that specific feeling. Otherwise, no thinking, no input, nothing. There’s a huge empty space where my thinking used to be… it leads me to consider that this is why the world exists; the desire to be thinking – but then I realise I’m thinking again.

I spend most of the time thinking about how to see it, how to get there, but not actually “seeing it” or “getting there.” How to get out of this conundrum? You have to be an accomplished meditator to do that, and there are only a few in this world, I have to find them and observe and see how it’s done. One Buddhist monk we can follow is Ajahn Brahm and I want to bring you into his world in the examination of this wonderful Pali word which means: ‘one-pointedness’ (ekaggatā)… he is talking about the first jhāna:

“One-pointedness is mindfulness that is sharply focused on a minute area of existence. It is one-pointed in space because it sees only the point-source of bliss. It is one-pointed in time because it perceives only the present moment, so exclusively and precisely that all notion of time completely disappears. And it is one-pointed in phenomena because it knows only one object – the mental object of pīti-sukha (joy happiness), and is totally oblivious to the world of the five senses and one’s physical body.

Such one-pointedness in space produces the peculiar experience, only found in jhāna, of non-dual consciousness, where one is fully aware but only of one thing, and from one angle, for timeless periods. Consciousness is so focused on the one thing that the faculty of comprehension is suspended a while. Only after the one-pointedness is dissipated, and one has emerged from the jhāna, will one be able to recognize these features of the first jhāna and comprehend them all.

The one-pointedness in time produces the extraordinary stability of the first jhāna (Note the Wobble), allowing it to last effortlessly for such a long period of time. The concept of time relies on measuring intervals from past to present or present to future of from past to future. When all that is perceived within the first jhāna is the precise moment of now, then there is no room for measuring time. All intervals have closed. It is replaced with timelessness unmoving.

One-pointedness of phenomena produces the exceptional occurrence of bliss upon bliss, unchanging throughout the duration of the jhāna. Mystic traditions more recent than Buddhism have been so overwhelmed by the pure otherworldliness of the first jhāna, they have understood the experience as ‘union with God.’ (April 29, 2022) However, the first jhāna is the first level of supramundane bliss and there are another seven levels of jhāna to experience.” [Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond, Ajahn Brahm]

Following up on the Eckhart and Zen discussion recently, I came across another Buddhist monk who can bridge the gap between Christian and Buddhist Mystics:

“Just because Buddhism rejects a discussion of a personified Godhead, does not mean there are not many parallels that can be drawn to mystics in the various theistic religions.  Since theists tend to describe their God in terms of an infinite dimension, then I believe it is reasonable to acknowledge that the nonmaterial absorptions (arupa-jhanas) are fundamentally the experience of the union (yoga) with the infinite God/Jehovah/Brahma.” [Jhanananda (Jeffrey S. Brooks)]

There’s more to be said on this subject and I’ll continue to research the parallels between the theists and the atheists. In doing so we will perhaps move away from the way the dhammafootsteps blog has been going since 2012 (Note: This is the 500th post), and mark the new decade with a new format. What I’m planning to do is reblog or reprint texts from related sources and write a short analysis here and there, similar to recent posts on Meister Eckhart. Let’s see, what I’m saying dear readers, is I cannot continue blogging the way I’ve been doing these last ten years. My eyesight is not good enough; macular degeneration in the right eye.

The condition alters what I see around the centre of vision; horizontal lines appear to have a ‘bend’ in the middle, it means lines of text are distorted and I can’t read the words unless I close my right eye and look through my left eye. Also, these small black spots like mosquitos moving over the page take the place of random punctuation marks. Treatment started in June 2022 and is ‘ongoing.’

You can imagine then; it takes a very long time to write a post and I depend on the spell checker app to tell me when I have the spacing between words all wrong. I’m dependent also on the automated suggestions app for rewriting sentences that don’t make sense in their present form. With the help of these aids, and my keen interest in the subject, I expect to be propelled into finding the texts to re-blog, re-publish… and re-new!

Let other people do the talking and I shall take a back seat for a while. Remember, your comments and dialogue are the actual Postcards from the Present Moment. Merry Christmas to One and All

Tiramit, 23 December 2022